Indeed, until recently there was no monument of any significance
to those who lost their lives in the most dramatic incident in the history of
Sheffield, the Great Sheffield Flood of
1864.

The Sheffield Waterworks Company, desperately trying to keep up
with accelerating demand from the rapidly growing steel industry and the
expanding population, devised a scheme to capture the waters of the Loxley
Valley, north-west of the town.

The first of three planned reservoirs, Dale Dyke, was begun in
1859 and, after its alignment had been altered to avoid unexpected disturbed
strata, was completed and filled by early 1864.

No sooner had the waters reached within two feet of the lip of the
dam than cracks appeared and, within a day, the dam collapsed at 11.30pm on March
11th 1864, sending 700 million gallons of water down the Loxley Valley at a
speed of around 18 miles an hour. At
least 250 people were killed, including 27 whose bodies were never
recovered. Around 800 houses were
destroyed or abandoned and well over 4,000 flooded.

There was no firm agreement over the cause of the disaster, at
least partly because of the Coroner’s intemperate handling of the inquest. Among the possible contributory causes were –

slippage of unstable strata beneath the embankment

poor construction of the embankment surrounding the clay core

inadequate thickness of the clay core

settlement or undue pressure leading to fracture around the outlet
pipes and consequent leakage

The jury’s verdict was that “there has not been that engineering skill and that attention to the construction of the works, which their magnitude and importance demanded…” and they went on to propose that “the Legislature ought to take such action as will result in a governmental inspection of all works of this character; and, that such inspection should be frequent, sufficient and regular…”

Such legislation was eventually passed – the Reservoirs (Safety
Provisions) Act (1930).

Although designed in the same way as the failed dam, Agden Dam was
resumed and its 629,000,000-gallon reservoir completed in 1869. Further upstream, the Strines Reservoir
(513,000,000 gallons) was finished in 1871.

The new Dale Dyke Dam, a quarter of a mile upstream from the site
of the original, was completed in 1875, though the reservoir was not brought
fully into use until 1887. It holds
446,000,000 gallons.

The final Loxley valley reservoir, Damflask, which holds
1,158,000,000 gallons, initially intended for use as compensation water, was
constructed in the late 1870s but because of leakage through the strata at one
side was not fully operational until a wing-trench was completed in 1896.

For many years the only physical memento of the original Dale Dyke
Dam was a marker stone inscribed “CLOB” – Centre Line Old Bank – indicating the
alignment of the 1864 dam.

The Cemeteries and Sewerage: the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness (September 16th-20th 2021) tour follows the course of the Great Sheffield Flood from the site of the original Dale Dike Dam through to the Lower Don Valley downstream of the centre of Sheffield. For further details of the tour please click here.

On the north-western outskirts of Sheffield, a short walk up the Rivelin Valley from the Supertram terminus at Malin Bridge, a gateway leads to the Roman Catholic cemetery of St Michael, opened in 1862 and still in use: https://www.saintmichaelscemetery.org.

After the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the first
parish church in the area was St Bede’s,
opened at Masborough on the then outskirts of Rotherham in 1842. It was followed by the parish church of St Marie in Sheffield (1850), now the
cathedral of the Diocese of Hallam, and another large church, St Vincent’s (1853 onwards) was started
in The Crofts, an overcrowded area north of the town centre where Irish
Catholics settled after the Potato Famine.

Of these, only St Bede’s had a burial ground, until in 1862 the priest at St Vincent’s, Father Burke, purchased eight acres of steeply sloping land in the Rivelin Valley from the snuff-manufacturer Mr Wilson, whose family had also provided the land for the General Cemetery nearly thirty years before.

The cemetery, with a temporary chapel, was dedicated on Michaelmas Day, September 29th 1863.

The present chapel was built in 1877, financed by a gift of £2,000 from the Sheffield tailor and gents’ outfitter, George Harvey Foster, and designed by the father-and-son practice Matthew Ellison and Charles Hadfield. This new chapel is 72 feet long and 22 feet wide, built in the Early English style. It has an apsidal east end, a sixty-foot-high bellcote above the west door, and the south-west porch is embellished with a statue of St Michael slaying Satan as a dragon.

The interior, restored in 2005, is distinguished by the work
of an impressive group of contemporary artists.
The marble and alabaster altar, with its figure of the dead Christ, is
from the Cheltenham workshop of the sculptor Richard Lockwood Boulton.

Further decorations were funded by a gift of £430 by the
Foster family in 1884 – wall paintings by Charles Hadfield and Nathaniel
Westlake, who also designed the west window, and the three east windows,
designed by John Francis Bentley who later became the architect of Westminster
Cathedral and manufactured by Nathaniel Westlake’s stained-glass company,
Lavers & Westlake.

The two most prominent monuments in the cemetery stand above
the family vaults of George Harvey Foster (1829-1894), and the department-store
proprietor, John Walsh (d1905), respectively gothic and neo-Classical and
constructed within a decade of each other.

The sharp gradient makes exploring the cemetery a strenuous
activity, and visitors are advised not to stray from paths because gravestones
may be unstable.

Higher up the valley side are two more burial grounds, a
very small Jewish cemetery and the Church of England Walkley Cemetery, both
opened in 1860.

The launch took place in the fly tower of the Abbeydale Picture House, and Darren
asked me to explain to his guests the history of this unique piece of cinema
heritage.

The Grade II listed Abbeydale Picture House was always a gem
among Sheffield’s suburban cinemas, and thanks to a succession of sympathetic
owners it’s survived to entertain new generations of patrons nearly a hundred
years after its opening.

One of six Sheffield cinemas to open in 1920, its original
proprietors were local businessmen, led by a professional cinema exhibitor,
seeking to capitalise on the demand for entertainment after the First World
War.

They hedged their bets by instructing the architect, Pascal
J Steinlet, to build a full-scale theatre fly tower, enabling the cinema screen
to be flown out of the way of stage performances, and to use the sloping site
to include a ballroom and billiard hall beneath the auditorium and stage, with
a café to serve cinema patrons.

The directors considered that moving pictures alone might
not generate enough trade, and when post-war inflation ate into their original
budget of £50,000 they changed plans and installed an organ by the Sheffield
firm Brindley & Co.

Because Pascal Steinlet had not been briefed to include an
organ chamber, the instrument stood immediately behind the screen, centre
stage, making it impossible to use the stage and dressing rooms for
performances.

Anxious to generate income, they opened the cinema as soon
as they could, on December 20th 1920.
The Lord Mayor, Alderman Wardley, attended the first film-performance, a
costume romance, The Call of the Road,
starring Victor McLaglen.

Their fear that film alone would not support the company
proved correct. In June 1921 the
original board was replaced by the directors of the Star Cinema, Ecclesall
Road, who quickly took out debentures to complete the café, ballroom and
billiard hall before the end of the year.

In 1928, probably as a response to the imminent arrival of talking
pictures, the organ was moved to the back of the stage, where it was barely
audible, to make way for cine-variety performances, which continued until the
first sound film, Janet Gaynor in Sunny
Side Up, played on March 10th 1930.

The organ continued in use until 1940, and the last
organist, Douglas Scott, complained that “the volume was poor, due to the fact
that the organ chambers were placed as far back as possible on the stage and…at
least 20% of the sound went through the stage roof. The screen and tabs took their toll of sound
and when the safety curtain was lowered nothing could be heard in the theatre.”

There’s evidence for this on the back wall of the fly tower,
where two rows of holes for the joists of the stage floor are visible, the
higher row showing a clear gap where after 1928 the organ would have stood on
the original stage floor. The position of
the organ meant that only the downstage half of the stage was usable, so
presumably the rake was increased to maintain the sight-lines Pascal Steinlet
had intended.

I hope that when the building is comprehensively restored
the stage floor will be reinstated so that it can be used for performances.

When the very last Sheffield tram came off the streets in
October 1960 an assiduous member of its load of enthusiasts made sure that, as
the gates of Tinsley Tram Sheds closed behind it, its destination indicator
showed ‘CEMETERY GATES’.

The cemetery gates at which Intake trams sometimes turned back was City Road, established by the newly-formed Sheffield Burial Board on a site east of the town-centre purchased from the 15th Duke of Norfolk in 1881.

The original buildings – Church of England and Nonconformist
chapels, a gateway and lodge on Manor Lane and a gatehouse and offices on City
Road, all in late Perpendicular style – were designed by the Sheffield
architects Matthew Ellison Hadfield & Son.

The initial apportionment of land was between the Church
of England (slightly over 20 acres), the Nonconformists (13 acres) and the
Roman Catholics (7 acres), leaving 9 acres to allocated as required in future.

There was no Roman Catholic chapel at the cemetery until 1898, when the Duke of Norfolk commissioned a design with a hexagonal sanctuary and a central lantern above the altar, 60 feet long, by Matthew Ellison Hadfield’s son Charles. Dedicated to St Michael, the foundation stone was laid on July 22nd 1899, and it was consecrated on October 11th 1900.

A subsequent resolution by the Burial Board allowed the
space in front of the chapel to be used for burials of Catholic clergy, and it
became known as the Priest Vaults.

In 1901 Sheffield Corporation, having taken over the
functions of the Burial Board the previous year, gained legal powers to
construct one of the first municipal crematoria in Britain, and commissioned
Charles Hadfield and his son Charles Matthew Ellison Hadfield to design an
octagonal structure alongside the Nonconformist chapel, based on the Abbot’s
Kitchen at Glastonbury so that the steel exhaust from the cremator could pass
through the Gothic lantern which provided light and ventilation to the space
below.

Charles M E Hadfield’s bronze catafalque was constructed
by the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts and installed in the chapel, and a
columbarium was installed in the south side of the City Road entrance range.

The crematorium opened on April 5th 1905. The first cremation was of Eliza Hawley of
Upperthorpe, on April 24th 1905, in the presence of her family, the architect
and the Town Clerk. A further six
cremations took place in the following six months to November 1905.

The Church of England chapel was demolished in 1982, having been made redundant by the construction of a modern chapel to the north of the crematorium. All the other original buildings on the site remain, though the Catholic Chapel has been derelict for years.

City Road Cemetery is included in the itinerary of the Cemeteries and Sewerage: the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness (September 16th-20th 2021) tour. For further details of the tour please click here.

Sheffield’s Old Town Hall, on Waingate, has stood empty and unmaintained for over twenty years. As far back as 2007 it figured on the Victorian Society’s annual list of endangered buildings, and it’s more recently been added to SAVE Britain’s Heritage Buildings at Risk register.

Eventually, in August this year, a planning application was
posted proposing a solution to the dilemma of what to do with this huge public
building with its sensitive interiors.

The new owner, Mr Efekoro Omu, is already refurbishing the long-neglected Cannon public house on Castle Street.

Mr Omu’s company, Aestrom OTH, plans to clean and restore
the exterior of the Old Town Hall, and intends to strip out much of the listed
interior to provide twelve serviced apartments, twelve “pod” hotel rooms in the
old cells and, on the basement and lower ground-floor levels, a “souk” – “a
boutique marketplace of characterful commercial spaces” of 918 square metres
(equal to 3½ tennis courts).

Mr Omu’s scheme threatens to obliterate the three most
impressive courtroom spaces and compromise the Waiting Hall area, making the
interior as a whole unreadable as a former courthouse.

There’s no doubt that any historic building has to earn its
own keep. In this case, the current
scheme prioritises commercial necessity above historic integrity.

Some parts the Old Town Hall complex, especially the 1955
extension, lend themselves to radical alteration because their historic value
is inconsiderable.

The earlier interiors, dating back to the nineteenth century
with some later alterations, need more tactful treatment.

Sheffield can boast of a number of practical, attractive, sensitive refurbished historic buildings within a couple of minutes’ walk of the Old Town Hall, such as the Old Post Office in Fitzalan Square and the former bank that is now the Curzon Cinema on George Street.

The Planning Committee of Sheffield City Council meets on
November 19th to decide whether to approve this application concerning a major
public building in an area of the city that’s subject to radical redevelopment.

Let’s hope that the Committee gives Mr Omu every encouragement to think again in more depth about how to revive the Old Town Hall, which deserves a better fate than to become a historic shell.

It’s pointless to argue for the retention of a historic
building, listed or not, without the means to maintain it into the future.

Seventeenth-century Carbrook Hall, for many years a pub in the heart of Sheffield’s industrial east end, closed in 2017, yet another casualty of the inexorable decline of the British public house, and a year later suffered an arson attack that was fortunately arrested before the entire building went up in smoke.

Local historians and CAMRA members hoped it would reopen as
licensed premises, but its new owner, the property developer Sean Fogg, applied
lateral thinking and leased it to the coffee chain, Starbucks.

Mr Fogg spent £700,000, assisted by Starbucks’ contribution
of £400,000, to restore the remaining stone wing of what was a much larger
house, enhancing its surroundings, replacing a nondescript twentieth-century
service block with a tactful 21st-century drive-in facility, and bringing the
three exceptional historic interiors to a high state of preservation.

Walking into the building is a time-warp, because the
coffee-shop counter, located where the pub bar used to be, is an
up-to-the-minute skinny-latte-and-panini experience.

Turn left and enter the Oak Room, though, and despite the
bright lighting and modern furniture, you’re surrounded by high-quality
panelled walls and a crisp plaster ceiling that witnessed the discussions about
besieging Sheffield Castle during the Civil War nearly four centuries ago.

This was the home of the Puritan Bright family, in those days lost in the spacious meadowlands of the Lower Don Valley. It’s possible that their interior decorators were the craftsmen who worked on the Little Keep at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire. It’s the oldest building in the valley and has seen no end of changes.

At the opposite end of the ground floor is an ancient
kitchen with stone stoves and a bread oven.

A second panelled room upstairs is not yet completed, but
will be dedicated to public use when fully restored.

On the popular Bus Ride Round Attercliffe trips that I run in conjunction with South Yorkshire Transport Museum, we regularly make a stop at the English Institute of Sport Sheffield, to show that the Lower Don Valley has begun an astonishing transformation since the demise of the heavy steel industry in the early 1980s.

Designed by FaulknerBrowns Architects, the Institute opened in December 2003, funded by Sport England and managed by SIV Ltd, a Health and Well Being Charity. It’s newer than the Arena and the demolished Don Valley Stadium which were built for the 1991 World Student Games. It’s even newer than the nearby IceSheffield, designed by the Building Design Partnership and opened in May 2003.

It has and continues to provide training facilities for an impressive array of champions, including Sheffield-born heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, boxers Anthony Joshua and Nicola Adams and the Paralympian table-tennis player Will Bailey, as well as sixty local sports clubs and seventy thousand local school children a year.

The initial cost of the facility was £28 million, and the Institute aims to balance usage at 90% local community to 10% elite athletes.

Our guide, Ryan Ruddiforth, shows Bus Ride passengers, many
of whom grew up in Attercliffe after the Second World War, the facilities for
boxing, wheelchair basketball and – most impressive of all – the huge 200-metre
indoor running track.

I’m looking forward to offering heritage bus-ride experiences to groups from outside Sheffield in 2020, and in the ‘Sheffield’s Industrial Heritage’ tour I plan to take people first of all to Magna, to see the hot, dark, dangerous spaces where workers spent their days in the steel industry and then, for contrast, to EISS to experience the light, clean, air-conditioned spaces in which people exercise and perfect their sport skills in the twenty-first century.

The Valley has come a long way within a lifetime, and I want
to present this in as dramatic a way as possible.

The ‘Sheffield’s Industrial Heritage’ bus tours are arranged on an individual basis, and Magna and EISS may not always be available because of major events taking place. On occasions the Bus Ride may visit other equivalent buildings in the city centre or the Lower Don Valley. For further details please click here.

For details of the next public Bus Ride Round Attercliffe, please click here.

The Bus Ride Round Attercliffe that was due to take place on Sunday afternoon, April 19th, has been cancelled because of the complications associated with the coronavirus outbreak.

People who have made previous bookings will be notified when a new date becomes possible. Anyone else is welcome to send a message to mike@mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk asking to be added to the mailing list.

The Lower Don Valley – that is, the villages of Attercliffe, Carbrook and Darnall – was the powerhouse of Sheffield’s heavy steel industry and was where many of its workers lived.

Even though some of the remaining historic buildings are inaccessible to visitors, and much has gone altogether, there’s still plenty to see.

The star of the event is a 1954 Sheffield Corporation Leyland Titan double-deck bus – no 687 (RWB 87) – immaculately restored and part of the South Yorkshire Transport Museum fleet.

From a top-deck seat there’s a grandstand view, on and off the main roads – industrial sites, schools, pubs, places of worship and sites associated with crimes, riots and the Blitz.

Riding in the sort of vehicle that replaced the trams in the
1950s is itself an experience, because buses have changed so much in half a
century.

Colin Morton, who will be the driver, says that driving 687
is much more physically demanding than its 21st-century successors. There’s no power steering and the crash
gearbox requires double-declutching, which was once normal procedure and is
becoming a lost art.

Colin is a fully qualified PSV driver with decades of experience, and he tells me that the Museum is short of younger volunteers prepared to learn how to manage the heritage fleet for wedding hires and other events.

So if you have time to spare and the patience to learn the skills, driving a 1950s or 1960s bus will keep you fit as well as bring pleasure to passengers of all ages: https://sytm.co.uk/join/volunteer.html.

Places are limited so that everyone can have a top-deck seat, yet people with mobility and other impairments are very welcome to use the lower deck.

For information about some of the historic buildings that survive in Attercliffe – and some that don’t – please click here.

The announcement that the new Tram-Train service between Sheffield Cathedral and Rotherham Parkgate would begin service on Thursday October 25th 2019 was not before time.

It was initially planned to open in 2015, and the seven new Tram-Train vehicles have been running on the main Stagecoach Supertram network since September 2017.

The South Yorkshire Supertram network now runs two separate fleets, the original German-built Siemens-Düwag units of 1992 (numbers 101-125) and the seven new Spanish-built Vossloh vehicles (number 201-207).

Even before the new service started up, the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (SYPTE) initiated a consultation exercise to determine the future of the system from 2024, when the Stagecoach franchise expires: https://www.travelsouthyorkshire.com/futuretram.

It seems that no provision has been made to finance the replacement of the original fleet, which is nearing the end of its useful life.

This has, predictably, greatly exercised the tram-enthusiast community – [http://www.britishtramsonline.co.uk/news/?p=24061] – and provoked South Yorkshire taxpayers (such as me) to query whether their community charge and taxes are being wisely spent.

I wonder if this option among a range of others is actually political shroud-waving.

It’s not simply a matter of scrapping the vehicles and covering the tracks with tarmac, as happened to Sheffield’s first tram-system in the 1950s. Not only has most of the track been relaid over the past few years, but dismantling Supertram would involve demolishing viaducts and reconfiguring road junctions and traffic signals across an eighteen-mile network.

It would also fly in the face of applying the results of the Tram-Train pilot scheme to other parts of South Yorkshire as well as the rest of the UK.

As a Sheffield resident I’ve often wondered why the South Yorkshire Supertram system has not developed, apart from Tram-Train, since it opened a quarter of a century ago.

In that time the Manchester tram-system has extended from two former rail routes with a street link into Piccadilly Station to seven routes (with an eighth, to Trafford Park, under construction) and the original 26 trams have been replaced by a fleet of 120 trams with 27 more on order.

In Nottingham, an initial service to the north of the city has grown to an X-shaped system running 37 trams over twenty miles of track, and the Birmingham tram-line to Wolverhampton, which initially stopped short of the city-centre, is now extending across the city with the intention of reaching Edgbaston by 2021.

In Edinburgh, where the tribulations of construction caused uproar, the tram service is hugely popular and likely to be extended in the next few years.

Why is there talk – even hypothetically – of shutting down Supertram when other cities are reaping the benefits of light rail?

Last week I received a letter from the Church Commissioners (because I’d made a formal objection to the demolition in 2013) notifying me that St Cecilia’s has at last been closed and the daughter-church of St Bernard of Clairvaux is the parish church with effect from August 16th 2018.

St Bernard’s was completed, using recycled bricks from the demolished mansion at Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, in 1954 as one of two mission churches in the vast Parson Cross parish.

The other church, Christ the King, Deerlands Avenue, was consecrated on the afternoon of the first Sheffield Blitz, December 12th 1940. It closed in 1970 and was sold: it became a Roman Catholic social club, St Patrick’s, and is now a showroom.

The notice of closure indicates that St Cecilia’s “shall be appropriate to use for residential purposes and for purposes ancillary thereto”, and “the contents of the old church building shall be disposed of as the Bishop shall direct”, in line with the Draft Pastoral Scheme about which I posted an article in 2016.

It’s probably the best possible outcome.

It saves the residents of Chaucer Close from the noise and mess of a brick-by-brick demolition.